Hack Night got hacked

Each month, we open our doors for a Hack Night, inviting others to join us as we experiment with and work on various technologies.

For the August Hack Night, we sharpened our focus and added a little more structure. For the first time, we posed a challenge to those attending: Could they hack our RFID door reader to allow our chat robot to open the front door of our office?

The answer is yes. Highgroovers Zac, Brian, Charles and Stafford joined forces with a few others from the community. Together, with an Arduino board, a power drill and Ruby, they achieved success.

Project progress

Other Highgroovers also made progress with their projects:

Andy tackled syncing his Fitbit through the Linux-based Raspberry Pi, despite the lack of an official Linux client. After installing Python and pip, he was able to use libfitbit to get syncing working for any Fitbit in range.

Don improved his Body Boss app, which creates workout challenges based on users’ fitness goals. After Hack Night, users can create and rearrange workouts for themselves or others, including setting the number of reps and amount of weight used.

Steven used some CSS wizardry to build a responsive search UI for his favorite side project, Brewdega.